


Red Sky at Morning

by cohobbitation



Category: Watchmen
Genre: M/M, post-squid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2019-11-07 10:05:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17958446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cohobbitation/pseuds/cohobbitation
Summary: Rorschach pleads for the end, and Jon Osterman says no. Daniel Dreiberg picks him up afterward, holds him together until he can carry him someplace safe to fall apart. They wait. The world ends in the meantime. And they’re still there after the world has gone on. Hell is frozen over; the sun rises in Antarctica; and no matter how long you starve them some appetites must be fed.Love is one of them.





	Red Sky at Morning

The last woman on earth takes the hand of her glowing creature, uncomprehensible and uncomprehending. They resolve to make another go at it, and light out for parts unknown. Behind them, a beautiful monster and his blood cool on the tiles of Karnak, his head split in two: the smartest man in the morgue. Ammat the Devourer has found him unworthy. Outside them all, the bombs fall, raining devastation on the decent and detestable alike. Within, the last two men in the world lay down together, and throw off all pretense. They cry. They plead. They find some absolution. In his moment of crisis Rorschach throws off his mask, and Daniel does not loathe him for the knowledge of what he truly is. Daniel has known him, truly known him, for twenty years. It’s a long time coming around, but they make it.

The doomsday clock stands at five minutes past midnight, and all is not well.

They lay there, clinging and crying, trying to figure out what to do next.

The doomsday clock stands at three in the morning, and all is quiet.

_Red sky at dawn... red sky at dawn..._

The sun is rising.

Daniel casts around for his glasses, and Rorschach holds himself together, his decency and his buttons torn away in one final despair.

Their hands touch. It is November the second; Antarctica is rolling into high summer. All Souls’ Day has come and gone.

 _Hiroshima lovers_ , Rorschach thinks, bundled into Daniel’s lap, running his hands through the back of his hair as Daniel fades back into bereft sobbing. _How he had hated Hiroshima lovers._ He wonders if this is how the Japanese felt. He wonders if they, and the rest of the Pacific theater, have made it out unscathed. He hopes so.

Too late, too late.

 _You tried,_ the ghost of Blair Roche says. _You tried, when no one else would. Sometimes that has to be enough._

“...what do we even do now?” His voice is rusty and disused, more so than usual. Forty-five years of tears have thickened it.

Daniel has run down into quiet. He sighs, and the breath goes straight under Rorschach’s collar into the bare flushed skin of his neck. All his small hairs stand up, and he cannot bring himself to hate himself for it.

“There has to be coffee around here somewhere,” Dan says.

“Mmhm,” Rorschach says by way of agreement.

Morning comes.


End file.
